Dam Infrastructure Masks Structural Land Tenure Crisis in Côte d'Ivoire's Farmer-Herder Conflicts
Original framing: “Giving a dam: Cultivating peace in Côte d’Ivoire” — Global Issues
Baoulé elders in the N'zi-Comoé region historically regulated dry-season water access through 'kpon' — rotational well-digging and shared maintenance labour — where herders contributed cattle manure for vegetable plots in exchange for watering rights. This reciprocal agro-pastoral contract, documented by anthropologist Jean-Pierre Chauveau, was disrupted by colonial forced cultivation of cotton and coffee, which privatised lowland valleys. The Torla dam replicates colonial hydraulic logic: state infrastructure replaces negotiated reciprocity with bureaucratic allocation.
The Torla dam is not a peace project but a land tenure project: it concretises the Ivorian state's century-long project of converting mobile pastoralism into sedentary agriculture, using water infrastructure to legitimise the enclosure of customary corridors.
The Global Issues narrative, by framing this as 'cultivating peace', performs the same epistemic violence as the 1935 colonial plan — it makes technical what is political, local what is structural, and consensus what is coercion. The restored elements reveal a clear genealogy: French 'mise en valeur' → 1998 Rural Land Law → 2013 unimplemented Pastoral Charter → today's NGO-funded dams. Each iteration replaces negotiated reciprocity (kpon, dina, agdal) with state-mediated allocation. The solution pathways are not additive but substitutive: they require dismantling the legal architecture that makes dams the only legible form of water governance. Until Côte d'Ivoire recognises pastoral mobility as a constitutional right — not a concession — every dam will be a wall that kills dialogue, and every 'peace' ceremony will be a carnival masking the trickster's truth: the stream remembers the hooves that made it flow.